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TaskServer for Adding BPA to Third-Party Applications and Enterprise Application Integration (EAI)

Let’s suppose your organization has already purchased Sales Force Automation (SFA) software. Your sales representatives are using it to track contacts, schedule activities and increase overall efficiency.

Moving your sales force from its pencil-and-paper days to modern automation brought many immediate benefits. There’s no more misplaced contact information or frantic searches through stacks of paper when a prospect calls. When a sales representative is sick or leaves the company altogether, another representative can take over the accounts immediately because all account information is instantly available online. Not surprisingly, sales have improved.

And, as always, whenever a sale is closed a number of things occur. Contracts are written, work is scheduled, equipment gets shipped, support personnel are assigned, invoices are sent and payments are collected. But you see that most of these tasks are still done the old-fashioned paper-and-pencil way. You realize that, despite your SFA package, orders can still be misplaced, shipments are still delayed, assignments may still be missed, and so on.

You also realize that automating post-sale processes could increase productivity even more and reduce the chances of important tasks falling through the cracks. By automating post-sale processes, the status of every task for a given sale could be available instantly online. Bottlenecks could be detected and rectified promptly. The end result would be reduced cost of doing business and improved customer satisfaction. You realize that Business Process Automation (BPA) can contribute significantly to the success of your company, just as SFA did.

You know that seamlessly integrating your SFA software with BPA would streamline operations and eliminate redundant data entry. You’d like this seamless integration to be implemented simply so that a sales representative could just click a button when a deal is closed. You’d also like to extend all your third-party applications to include BPA.

In short, the scenario we’ve supposed shows why TaskServer™ is the optimum solution.

TaskServer™ makes the incorporation of BPA and enterprise application integration (EAI) possible for a large class of third-party, commercial applications. These applications include Microsoft Outlook 97, Outlook 2000 and most Web-based applications.

TaskServer™ makes it easy to add a standard user interface element (such as a button) in those applications and associate a script with it. The script will automatically execute a TaskServer™ task group when the button is clicked. If the third-party application supports an API, the script can fill the TaskServer™ task group with pertinent information such as the customer address, order information, contract number, billing information, and so on. The TaskServer™ button and script provide a seamless bridge between your third-party application and all your BPA tasks.

It can be this simple. With TaskServer™, when a salesperson closes a deal the person simply clicks on the “Deal Closed” button that appears in the account screen of the SFA software. This sets in motion all the post-sales tasks that need to be performed, providing a seamless bridge between your SFA and BPA.

TaskServer™ allows you to retain complete control of defining the tasks and sequencing them in the proper order. Graphical, easy-to-use administrative editors supplied by TaskServer™ make the automation process easy. Without any programming you may, for example, create a “Write Contract” task that will automatically be forwarded to one of the qualified contract writers in your company. Other tasks such as “Notify Drop Shipper,” “Send Invoices,” “Notify Legal Dept.,” and “Register Customer Warranty” could easily be incorporated into your post-sales TaskServer™ task group.

It’s likely that SFA software is just one of the many islands of automation in your company. Your accounting and order entry systems are other probable examples of such islands. These isolated systems are usually connected through manual business processes that exist between departments. Typically, documents are routed between the departments, and much of the information they convey must be repeatedly entered in disparate systems. Ultimately your goal should be not only to automate the manual processes but to also seamlessly integrate the automation islands. The optimum solution for such inter-application integration is also TaskServer™.

The sales force example illustrates a case where TaskServer can enable existing third-party software to trigger a sequence of tasks. But some of the tasks that are triggered may also require entry of information in a third-party application. For example, one of the tasks you associated with closing a sale involves entering customer information in the order-entry and fulfillment system. With TaskServer™ you could easily create a task that invokes a human fulfiller who will manually enter the required information. But a better solution would be to accomplish all the data entry without human intervention, which TaskServer™ also makes equally easy.

TaskServer’s powerful EAI features are designed to make software-to-software task automation very straightforward. It’s only necessary that the target application support an appropriate Application Programming Interface (API). TaskServer™ handles the rest. This means that you can create a task in TaskServer™ and then provide a TaskServer™ software fulfiller for the task using Visual Basic or other languages. The software object will enter the information into the third-party application through its API.

These are general examples of the ways TaskServer™ acts as a powerful tool that will automate business processes and provide the “software glue” that unifies employees, processes and systems into a single smoothly functioning unit. If you’d like specific information on how TaskServer™ can add BPA and integrate existing applications in your particular environment, please e-mail us at info@taskserver.com or call our U.S. office at 603.881.9191 .